a spreading of wings, a bating of breath, a sense of something coming

Tear it down, start again.

Stopped dead — like the end of a concept more than a sentence. The end of a cycle more than a moment. The end of a system more than an instance. The end of something you were, are, always will be achingly reaching for–

So strong and confident unbroken, you still have this ancient and demonic curse in your blood and veins and bones. The proof it exists is how you get trapped up in orange netting every time you try to climb off the ropes.

Left standing, staring and waiting for the authorities to spray capsaicin in your face.

Lost and drowning in the momet of total suspension. Just held frozen in thin, ice cold air high up above the stratosphere. Not moving and not headed anywhere.

Sensations like expressions, like voices in your head, sink in before you realize nobody is touching you at all. Something silly like hitting yourself in the nose with a pair of headphones manages to crack the glass you’ve been edging, pushing, pressing desperately up against.

This eventual break makes hardly any noise at all.
Just a late-conceived breath that never finds station, never comes to fruition, never gets born — no, just aborted, completely truncated in your chest. No life and no choice in it. Just the pure happenstance of the moment when you feel it give. You can try to gasp, grasp, go on after it, but what’s the use?

Staring glass-eyed, red-rimmed and swollen from too much blood flow, too much pressure pressing on the sockets there. Reality all around you, but the sense of it only comes now through liquid sea salt saline and the blurry clarity of it all. And goddamn it, you just can’t see right.

Always the thing you think to say is the wrong word or the wrong way and the passion of the fire gets out of you too soon and you burn all your loved ones away. Charred chaff and wind carrying the fire to burn the forest down before your eyes.

How many times have you stood on this mountain ledge with no way down? Scarred up to the knees and burned black by your own dreams? These chances go up in cinder, ash, and smoke. You always knew, always know it.

Physical pain like the snap of whip across your skin, a rainbow knife blade across the surface of your heart tears the faintest holes that bring you back to the moment, the present at all. Blood bleeds access to the brokenness you have, for years and lifetimes, tried to tuck away.

Don’t repeat the scenes now; you already know them all too well.
Don’t replay the words, the feeling, the sensation of your teeth against your bone. You know, already, how the feelings feel when the hurt gets in this close.

Vioreta is a made-up word you’ve only created, interpretted, invented to gain access to the things you can’t escape. Nobody outside the walls will get the implications of the darkness you have to face. Don’t try to explain.

I sleep lonely, but not alone.
I live cold, but not exactly hollow.
I know the temper of a broken heart because mine blooms constant and uncontrolled in the scorching summer sun.

A cross stakes down through my open mouth, sinks through flesh and bone, and settles in the bottom of the creature I knew I ought to be able to be. And yet, this vicous villany surrounding me is cracking my ability to stand against. And every last one my hopes are in with it.

I’m growing more and more terrified of the night, despite the ever-present light.
I’m crumbling apart, despite the glue I invented to prevent this.
I’m tearing at the seams of myself, despite how flawless this all seems.